EL DIABLO VS. 829LB BLACK BEAR

I'm a shitty runner. I mean a really, really shitty runner. I'm talking 13 minute mile shitty. It took me over 3 hours to run 11.1 miles. Sure, there was 1600 feet of elevation gain, but really, 3 hours? So it got me thinking yesterday, will I ever be able to run a 50k? A 50 mile? I guess if I had 5 or 6 days to set aside I might, but until then I'll just need to find some satisfaction in spending hours alone in the woods. I guess it won't matter to me much that I won't ever enter a race, after all, a good part of the reason I run is to get away from human beings, even nice hiking/running human beings. I've learned a lot about myself out there. I've learned that when the pain begins, it eventually goes away. I've learned to enjoy the few precious moments when the bewildering misfiring of chemicals in my head miraculously quiet themselves. I've learned that I no longer crave the swirling chaos of the city. I've learned that she and I had our few 'moments in grace' and now they are gone. I've learned that I need less and less to live a satisfying life. I'm still learning to make peace with what I see and feel when I'm out there; when the temperature is in the high teens, the sun barely rising over West Mountain, and the silence serving as both blessing and curse.

This is a brief explanation of why Nuclear Lake is, in fact, named Nuclear Lake. It's taken from the blog "Bean Road":

Nuclear Lake, in a hollow beneath West Mountain in Pawling, New York, is a beautiful spot with a troubled past.

When I was teaching physics at the Trinity-Pawling school in Pawling, the Appalachian Trail south of Pawling was a long roadwalk. The National Park Service bought a large parcel of woodland with the intent to reroute the trail. The process took several years however, because the property had been operated by the UNC (United Nuclear Corporation) and was the site of one of the few private uranium and plutonium research facilities in the United States. But nuclear research alone was not the main concern. In 1972, a chemical explosion blew out two windows in the north side of the laboratory, spewing an unknown amount of plutonium dust through the woods. United Nuclear cleaned up the property at a cost of $3 million, but local residents and Appalachian Trail hikers were concerned about the potential health risks.

In 1980, the old buildings and retention tanks were still there on the shore of Nuclear Lake, abandoned and decaying. Nearly 30 years later, the AT has been rerouted, and it now passes the site of the old laboratory and hugs the west shore of the lake. The old UNC sign and the buildings are gone now, though several large clearings remain.

It somehow makes sense that I would run at the site of a nuclear disaster...




























On a side not, This 829 lb bear was killed in North Jersey, not too far from Harriman State Park and Bear Mountain. I would kick that things ass:

SEEKING ABSOLUTION

18 miles. That's the distance from my front door to two different entrances to the Appalachian Trail. 18 miles to steep climbs, rocks, roots, and solitude. Solitude. I've recently stripped my life to the bone. I have no band, no friends in the immediate area, no hobbies other than writing and running, and I'm looking to the AT to help piece my life back together. It's unnecessary for me to catalog what I've been through in the last 7 months, but it's safe to say that I reached the outer limits of happiness and abject misery, and in the end it left me feeling pretty empty.

Today I ran 6.5 miles on a section of the AT I'd never run or hiked before. It was comforting to not know what was coming next and to just flow. This past Sunday I did a 7 mile run on a stretch of the trail that I know well. She and I used to spend hours there; climbing, eating junk food and Gu, and spilling our secrets. It was always warm and lush and the hours seemed to end far too quickly. The difference between those summer days and now is how the quiet seems to change so swiftly from calming to deeply unsettling. In the summertime there are birds, there are voices echoing on the trail, there is the sound of insects; all sounds that die in the winter months. In the summer there is proof of life and the winter dispenses with that. Recently the sound of winter is what I crave.

NUCLEAR LAKE TO CAT'S ROCK 12/10/2011











ROUTE 55 TO MORGAN STEWART SHELTER 12/13/2011

MISANTHROPY

Why humans, for the most part, are garbage...

Let's start with the douchebag that left the deer carcass in the parking lot this morning. I'm all for reducing the deer population, and I have great respect for anyone that can nail a deer with a bow, but leaving the carcass in the fucking parking lot? Really? There are plenty of people that bring their kids to hike the trails at Bennett's Pond. I can see it now... "Hey dad, why are there parts of Rudolph in that trash bag?" "Well, son, it's because people suck." So that's reason number one for me to dislike humanity on this lovely December morning.

Reason number two: FUCK CHRISTMAS. It's a stupid fucking holiday to begin with and when you add pieces of human garbage pepper spraying each other, stepping over dead people, and causing riots over two dollar waffle irons at Wal Mart, it's time to cull the human herd. Wanna embrace the "Christmas Spirit"? Instead of buying cheap plastic shit from China, why don't you try throwing a few bucks to someone that's in need. If you don't think you know anyone like that, you're not looking hard enough. You people make me pray for the apocalypse.

Reason three? I don't need another reason.

Here are some random pictures from the past 5 months; Mount Washington, Bennett's, Bear Mountain, My love for Penn State, and a bunch of other crap. Oh, and a deer carcass stuffed in a trash bag.






















RANT OVER.

ATTRITION WORN/ARSON BORN

It lasted 22 years and 9 months. It ended in a few very brief phone calls. We exit as we entered; ferocious, single minded, unapologetic, and without regret.

Beautiful, Repulsive, Hateful, And Soul Wrenching.

DISINTEGRATION

"Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutory daytime advice for every one. But at three o'clock in the morning ... the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream - but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world.

"One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza - one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one's own personality ..."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE KILLING SEASON

Since language has almost completely failed me, and at the moment I don't trust myself enough to try, I'll post some of my favorite quotes and a photo from my trip to Mount Washington. It's a terrible thing to not trust what you feel...




“I'm so good at beginnings, but in the end I always seem to destroy everything, including myself.” Kiera Van Gelder


"One of the oldest human needs is having someone to wonder where you are when you don't come home at night." Margaret Mead


"Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth." Benjamin Disraeli


"Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torments of man." Friedrich Nietzsche


"Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus." Wallace Stegner


"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed." Albert Einstein

"I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know ... that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow?" Ernest Becker


"Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems sped up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change." Edwin Way Teale

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn't show." Andrew Wyeth

SEPTEMBER 11, 2011

• I remember the alarm clock going off and hearing the news that a single plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers.
• I remember going downstairs to the lounge in my building in time to see the second plane hit.
• I remember having no context or frame of reference to understand what I was seeing.
• I remember being told by my PA school program director that if I went downtown to help, I would be permanently removed from school.
• I remember going to the ER at New York Presbyterian and seeing the staff gowned and gloved, not yet knowing that there was no one left to save.
• I remember standing in line at the Red Cross at Rockefeller University, and finding Emily. September 11th would become our anniversary.
• I remember the scent of molten steel, dust, and incinerated flesh that hung in the air like a shroud.
• I remember the sound of fighter jets flying overhead in a sound that would frighten me for years afterward.
• I remember the haunting stillness of the Avenues, free of sound and motion, that lasted for days.
• I remember how quickly the fliers went up, printed pleas for the disappeared; lives captured lovingly in brief paragraphs and photographs.
• I remember September 12th, walking, in tears, past block upon block of those photographs knowing that they were never coming home.
• I remember how the sun and rain eventually bleached those fliers of life, yet how long they endured.
• I remember going downtown while the pile still burned and seeing soldiers with automatic weapons and looks of stunned disbelief on their faces.
• I remember sitting outside of AA meetings and hearing stories of Father Mychal Judge, and how many men and women he had ushered into sobriety before dying on that day.
• I remember the deadened stare of my friend Russell, and how he told me that he couldn't survive another Firefighters funeral.
• I remember the black and purple banners hung from FDNY station houses to honor their (our) dead.
• I remember the guilt I felt when I was told that I would not be able to enlist because of a "preexisting medical condition". I still feel that guilt.
• I remember that New York City will always be one of the most magnificent and savagely elegant places on this earth.
• I remember.

CHAOS

"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star." Nietzsche